Thursday, May 1, 2008

Endeavour Jones

May ’08 – My most replayed song lately has been SAME HERE by Endeavour Jones. So many songs, especially the ones addressed to an anonymous ‘you’, are written simply to ease, in the moment of writing (and then of playing), the pain of being parted from the latest you-who-are-not-here. SAME HERE doesn’t go into particulars – the listener finds out neither why they are apart nor whether a happy reunion is shortly anticipated. In SAME HERE, the singer is going about his daily life as usual, yet for him everything is drastically changed, and only the voice he carries with him can understand: ‘I hear the silence of my room at night, I listen to its memories. I still pretend that you can hear my breath - it’s evidence of absence of one’s death. And you just whisper, “Same here, same here.”’

Of course, if you happened to have been Endeavour Jones’s correspondent since 1997, when you’d met him at the Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, then you’d be able to ask him for the full story behind the song. Even though we’ve only spent a total of three weeks in each other’s company, his voice is one that I carry around with me – about once a day I hear him make a comment about something I’m doing or seeing or thinking about. He is an extremely prolific maker-of-things – he has written two novels, made several short films, written hundreds of songs, he paints, he draws, he did a PhD about plane crashes in movies, he is a design professor in Bern, Switzerland, and he even sews! - (at this point I hear the voice of another friend, who sings a rather good ‘Making Whoopee’). With so much capacity, at times Endeavour Jones has been too sophisticated – jazz chords! - for a simple faux-country girl like me. Slightly dazzled, I used to wonder, “But who is the real Endeavour Jones?” Songwise, I know him better now, and understand that his flights of fancy are as true an expression of him as his cries from the heart.